A Citizens' Campaign for a New National Security Policy

The starting point for a citizens' campaign for a new national security strategy should be to call attention to the reality that US wars - supposedly against terrorism - have produced clear winners and losers. The winners are the leaders of the military, the Pentagon, the CIA and their private sector and elected political allies. Aggressive US wars are not merely the result of mistaken policies, but of the national security institutions pursuing their own interests at the expense of the interests of the American people.

The "war on terror" is a means for those institutions to maintain the present allocation of national resources and power to the national security sector for the indefinite future.

The losers are the rest of the American people. This "permanent war state" is now so politically powerful that it can keep the United States at war, even after the rationale for the war has been discredited or become irrelevant and the war has turned into a political and military disaster.

Over the past decade, the permanent war state has captured up to $1.3 trillion to pay for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as an additional $2.3 trillion in defense and other national security spending (homeland security, international affairs etc.) over and above the level of the first post-cold war decade. That appropriation by the national security state of an additional $3.6 trillion in additional resources during a decade of economic decline, accounting for 40 percent of the additional national debt, represents a power grab of immense proportions.

The most urgent reason to demand an end to the super-militarized approach to national security adopted by the US national security state is that it has created extreme anti-Americanism across the Islamic world that ensures that the American people will face the threat of terrorism against the US homeland for the indefinite future - with all the assaults on their freedoms that go with it.

This approach shifts the attention of activists from each individual war policy to the underlying war system and the interests that drive it. That shift allows an anti-militarism movement to adopt an offensive posture rather than one that is reactive and even defensive in the face of each new move by the national security state.

Ending the Provocation of Terrorist Threats

A citizens' campaign to change US national security policy should insist that the United States take the only steps that can sharply reduce and then end the threat of terrorism against the US homeland: the immediate withdrawal of all US troops from Islamic countries and an end to all military activities being waged in Islamic lands.

During the cold war, the United States avoided stationing troops in Islamic countries, in large part because of those well-known Islamic sensitivities about the stationing of Western troops in Islamic countries. It is no accident that the George H. W. Bush administration breached that longstanding injunction by launching the first Gulf War in 1991 and then maintaining a significant US military presence in Saudi Arabia just as the end of the cold war was threatening a drastic reduction in the military budget. The objective of the war and insertion of US military power into the Middle East was to create a new rationale for cold war levels of military spending by shifting the focus of military planning to regional adversaries; Saddam Hussein's Iraq was to be the primary exemplar.

Osama bin Laden's argument that the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia was unacceptable was supported not only by conservative Wahhabi Saudi clerics, but by many Islamic clerics throughout the Middle East and even in the predominantly non-Muslim countries. They urged Muslim faithful to defend Islam against US military incursions on Islamic lands. Those who responded to that message included the Saudi nationals who would later volunteer to participate in the al-Qaeda plan to fly US commercial planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, some of whom explicitly discussed the US occupation of Saudi Arabia as the reason for the 9/11 attacks in "martyr videos." (1)

Two bombing attacks on US forces in Saudi Arabia were carried out apparently by followers of Bin Laden in 1995 and 1996, after which Bin Laden declared open war against the United States for its military interference in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the region.

But even those dramatic warning signals prompted no rethinking of US military policy. On the contrary, the Pentagon and the Clinton administration continued to maintain a de facto state of war with Iraq through the 1990s punctuated by occasional bombing attacks against Iraqi targets.

Those whose personal and institutional interests are served by aggressive US military policy in the Middle East understood that they were increasing the risk of terrorism. The neoconservative historian Robert Kagan would later write, "We have pretty good reasons to believe ... that the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and the continuing presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia after the war, was a big factor in the evolution of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda." But Kagan, reflecting the views of the national security state, argued that the United States was right to go ahead with such military policies even if they knew they would result in terrorist attacks on the United States.(2) A "very senior officer" who served on the Pentagon's Joint Staff in the 1990s says he heard "more than once" from colleagues that terrorist attacks were "a small price to pay for being a superpower."(3)

The George W. Bush administration exploited the 9/11 attacks to pursue the interest of the national security state in making the United States the dominant military power in the Middle East. It sent forces into Afghanistan not to capture or kill Bin Laden, but to overthrow the Taliban regime. Then, it quickly began planning for the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

For those who were concerned primarily with terrorism, the danger of such a war to the American people was perfectly clear. In 2002, when the Bush administration was planning the invasion of Iraq, Rand Beers, then one of the two top White House counterterrorism officials, complained bitterly to his former boss, Richard Clarke, "Do you know how much it will strengthen al Qaeda and groups like that if we occupy Iraq?"(4)

After the US invasion of Iraq, volunteers from all over the Middle East quickly poured into Iraq, giving al-Qaeda, previously a small group hiding in the relatively inaccessible Kurdish region of Iraq, a new power and influence both in Iraq and in the Middle East more generally. In mid-2005 the CIA concluded in a classified assessment that Iraq had assumed the role once played by the jihad against Soviet occupation in Afghanistan in building up a cadre of jihadists with terrorist skills.(5) Two top former counterterrorism officials, Cofer Black and Roger Cressey, warned that the jihadists drawn to Iraq would eventually disperse to their home countries after having been trained in techniques of bombings and assassination, which could eventually threaten Americans directly.(6)

A National Intelligence Estimate issued in April 2006 concluded, "The Iraqi conflict has become the 'cause celebre' for jihadists, breeding deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim World and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement."(7) The former head of the CIA's counterterrorism center, Robert Grenier, warned that the US war had "convinced many Muslims that the United States is the enemy of Islam and they have become jihadists as a result of their experience in Iraq."(8)

Public opinion surveys and focus groups in nine Middle Eastern and South Asian Islamic countries in 2009 show that majorities ranging from 52 percent to 92 percent of the respondents believed the United States might threaten their country in the future. The fear and anger felt in those Islamic countries over US wars and troop presence in Islamic countries translates into support for attacks on the United States by substantial minorities ranging from 9 percent to 14 percent of the populations of those countries.(9) In a dramatic illustration of the effect on attitudes toward anti-US terrorism in the tribal area of northwest Pakistan, drone strikes have boosted recruiting for global jihadist groups and six out of ten respondents support suicide bombings against US military forces.(10)

Closing Down US Military Bases for Power Projection

One of the driving forces for US wars since the beginning of the cold war has been the constant push by the US military and its civilian allies to maintain or expand its network of military bases and alliances across the globe. In the early to mid-1960s, it was not the fear of "falling dominos" - i.e., communism sweeping across Southeast Asia - that motivated top US officials in the Johnson administration to call for war in Vietnam, but their fear of Asian accommodation with China. They were afraid of losing the dominant US military position in the Far East, consisting mainly of US air bases surrounding China and North Vietnam in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and Thailand.(11)

Likewise, the invasion of Iraq was driven by a desire for military bases in that country to ensure US political-military dominance of the entire Middle East/Persian Gulf region by allowing coercion of Iran and Syria. Thus, when the United States invaded Iraq, the Pentagon was already planning to maintain four "enduring bases" - meaning, permanent bases - in Iraq.(12) After Iraq insisted in 2008 on complete US withdrawal, the attention of the US military shifted to obtaining permanent bases in Afghanistan.

These permanent facilities are justified in variety of ways: the need to intimidate Iran, the continued war against al-Qaeda, the instability in Pakistan and the general advantage assumed to accompany US military power abroad. But any use of military force in the vast area where the network of bases is located would simply make Americans less secure. The real motive for projecting US military forces abroad is to enhance the power of the military institutions themselves and their Pentagon and other civilian allies, not to protect Americans from any serious threat to their security.

The security of the American people demands that all such bases intended to support wars that are not in the interests of the American people be closed down as part of the transformation of US national security policy from a posture that is provocative to Islamic peoples to one that is non-provocative.

The principle of avoiding military presence that provokes antagonistic responses applies to the complex of US military bases and alliances left over from the cold war in East Asia. The national security state argues that these bases are necessary to "shape" the security environment in East Asia. But that network of bases in the Asia-Pacific region still fulfills the same function that it did during the cold war. It is a vested interest in search of a rationale. Even after North and South Korea began negotiations on a settlement in the late 1990s, the Pentagon continued to have more military bases in East Asia.

The new rationale for expanding the US military footprint in Asia over the past decade has been to maintain a "hedge" against Chinese regional domination decades in the future. Such "hedging" in regard to possible war with China is central to the national security state's demand for extraordinary levels of military spending, without which it could justify wartime expenditures for the Air Force and Navy. That rationale is bogus; the consensus among intelligence and military analysts has long been that the importance of China's economic ties to the United States makes it unlikely that China will seek a confrontation with Washington.(13) A citizens' campaign should, therefore, call for a plan to phase out US bases in East Asia over the next decade.

Even if they don't suck the United States into a war, US military bases abroad are merely empty symbols of illusory power, which are regarded as perquisites of the US military's power at home and abroad. The only way to break the cycle of the quest for dominant power provoking conflict and insecurity is to demand that the United States adopt a policy like other major powers, including China, of abjuring foreign military presence.

Once the two main national security state dodges of wars against terrorism and power projection abroad are removed, the rationale for most US military spending disappears. There is no need for a large army, or for anything like the level of air and naval power sought for decades by those military services. The fundamental reform of national security policy should be accompanied by a cut in military spending to a fraction of the level during and after the cold war. This fundamental shift in policy from seeking dominant power to defending the homeland will, thus, require a comprehensive national plan for phasing out the present level of military spending and planning for peacetime economic alternatives in regard to production and employment.

A Legislative Charter for a New National Security Policy

In order to provide a focal point and action objective for a citizens' campaign for a new national security policy, we need a new legislative charter that outlines what must be done to bring about a decisive transition over the next few years from the existing policy to one that truly serves the interests of the American people.

That legislation should state, in part, that it "shall be the national policy of the United States":

to withdraw all military personnel from Islamic countries through a published timetable and to refrain from stationing troops or carrying out military operations in Islamic countries in the future;

to cease to pursue the aim of military dominance in the Middle East, the Persian Gulf and East Asia and to withdraw from military bases in those regions built on premises that are now clearly invalid;

to reduce military spending by 40 to 50 percent over the next three years and to continue to reduce spending further in the subsequent five-year period to a level representing no more than 30 percent of the level of military expenditures in fiscal year 2011;

to establish a national economic conversion plan to support this reduction in military expenditures.

Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and historian writing on US national security policy. His latest book, Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, was published in February of 2014. Follow him on Twitter: @GarethPorter.

A Citizens' Campaign for a New National Security Policy

The starting point for a citizens' campaign for a new national security strategy should be to call attention to the reality that US wars - supposedly against terrorism - have produced clear winners and losers. The winners are the leaders of the military, the Pentagon, the CIA and their private sector and elected political allies. Aggressive US wars are not merely the result of mistaken policies, but of the national security institutions pursuing their own interests at the expense of the interests of the American people.

The "war on terror" is a means for those institutions to maintain the present allocation of national resources and power to the national security sector for the indefinite future.

The losers are the rest of the American people. This "permanent war state" is now so politically powerful that it can keep the United States at war, even after the rationale for the war has been discredited or become irrelevant and the war has turned into a political and military disaster.

Over the past decade, the permanent war state has captured up to $1.3 trillion to pay for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as an additional $2.3 trillion in defense and other national security spending (homeland security, international affairs etc.) over and above the level of the first post-cold war decade. That appropriation by the national security state of an additional $3.6 trillion in additional resources during a decade of economic decline, accounting for 40 percent of the additional national debt, represents a power grab of immense proportions.

The most urgent reason to demand an end to the super-militarized approach to national security adopted by the US national security state is that it has created extreme anti-Americanism across the Islamic world that ensures that the American people will face the threat of terrorism against the US homeland for the indefinite future - with all the assaults on their freedoms that go with it.

This approach shifts the attention of activists from each individual war policy to the underlying war system and the interests that drive it. That shift allows an anti-militarism movement to adopt an offensive posture rather than one that is reactive and even defensive in the face of each new move by the national security state.

Ending the Provocation of Terrorist Threats

A citizens' campaign to change US national security policy should insist that the United States take the only steps that can sharply reduce and then end the threat of terrorism against the US homeland: the immediate withdrawal of all US troops from Islamic countries and an end to all military activities being waged in Islamic lands.

During the cold war, the United States avoided stationing troops in Islamic countries, in large part because of those well-known Islamic sensitivities about the stationing of Western troops in Islamic countries. It is no accident that the George H. W. Bush administration breached that longstanding injunction by launching the first Gulf War in 1991 and then maintaining a significant US military presence in Saudi Arabia just as the end of the cold war was threatening a drastic reduction in the military budget. The objective of the war and insertion of US military power into the Middle East was to create a new rationale for cold war levels of military spending by shifting the focus of military planning to regional adversaries; Saddam Hussein's Iraq was to be the primary exemplar.

Osama bin Laden's argument that the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia was unacceptable was supported not only by conservative Wahhabi Saudi clerics, but by many Islamic clerics throughout the Middle East and even in the predominantly non-Muslim countries. They urged Muslim faithful to defend Islam against US military incursions on Islamic lands. Those who responded to that message included the Saudi nationals who would later volunteer to participate in the al-Qaeda plan to fly US commercial planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, some of whom explicitly discussed the US occupation of Saudi Arabia as the reason for the 9/11 attacks in "martyr videos." (1)

Two bombing attacks on US forces in Saudi Arabia were carried out apparently by followers of Bin Laden in 1995 and 1996, after which Bin Laden declared open war against the United States for its military interference in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the region.

But even those dramatic warning signals prompted no rethinking of US military policy. On the contrary, the Pentagon and the Clinton administration continued to maintain a de facto state of war with Iraq through the 1990s punctuated by occasional bombing attacks against Iraqi targets.

Those whose personal and institutional interests are served by aggressive US military policy in the Middle East understood that they were increasing the risk of terrorism. The neoconservative historian Robert Kagan would later write, "We have pretty good reasons to believe ... that the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and the continuing presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia after the war, was a big factor in the evolution of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda." But Kagan, reflecting the views of the national security state, argued that the United States was right to go ahead with such military policies even if they knew they would result in terrorist attacks on the United States.(2) A "very senior officer" who served on the Pentagon's Joint Staff in the 1990s says he heard "more than once" from colleagues that terrorist attacks were "a small price to pay for being a superpower."(3)

The George W. Bush administration exploited the 9/11 attacks to pursue the interest of the national security state in making the United States the dominant military power in the Middle East. It sent forces into Afghanistan not to capture or kill Bin Laden, but to overthrow the Taliban regime. Then, it quickly began planning for the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

For those who were concerned primarily with terrorism, the danger of such a war to the American people was perfectly clear. In 2002, when the Bush administration was planning the invasion of Iraq, Rand Beers, then one of the two top White House counterterrorism officials, complained bitterly to his former boss, Richard Clarke, "Do you know how much it will strengthen al Qaeda and groups like that if we occupy Iraq?"(4)

After the US invasion of Iraq, volunteers from all over the Middle East quickly poured into Iraq, giving al-Qaeda, previously a small group hiding in the relatively inaccessible Kurdish region of Iraq, a new power and influence both in Iraq and in the Middle East more generally. In mid-2005 the CIA concluded in a classified assessment that Iraq had assumed the role once played by the jihad against Soviet occupation in Afghanistan in building up a cadre of jihadists with terrorist skills.(5) Two top former counterterrorism officials, Cofer Black and Roger Cressey, warned that the jihadists drawn to Iraq would eventually disperse to their home countries after having been trained in techniques of bombings and assassination, which could eventually threaten Americans directly.(6)

A National Intelligence Estimate issued in April 2006 concluded, "The Iraqi conflict has become the 'cause celebre' for jihadists, breeding deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim World and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement."(7) The former head of the CIA's counterterrorism center, Robert Grenier, warned that the US war had "convinced many Muslims that the United States is the enemy of Islam and they have become jihadists as a result of their experience in Iraq."(8)

Public opinion surveys and focus groups in nine Middle Eastern and South Asian Islamic countries in 2009 show that majorities ranging from 52 percent to 92 percent of the respondents believed the United States might threaten their country in the future. The fear and anger felt in those Islamic countries over US wars and troop presence in Islamic countries translates into support for attacks on the United States by substantial minorities ranging from 9 percent to 14 percent of the populations of those countries.(9) In a dramatic illustration of the effect on attitudes toward anti-US terrorism in the tribal area of northwest Pakistan, drone strikes have boosted recruiting for global jihadist groups and six out of ten respondents support suicide bombings against US military forces.(10)

Closing Down US Military Bases for Power Projection

One of the driving forces for US wars since the beginning of the cold war has been the constant push by the US military and its civilian allies to maintain or expand its network of military bases and alliances across the globe. In the early to mid-1960s, it was not the fear of "falling dominos" - i.e., communism sweeping across Southeast Asia - that motivated top US officials in the Johnson administration to call for war in Vietnam, but their fear of Asian accommodation with China. They were afraid of losing the dominant US military position in the Far East, consisting mainly of US air bases surrounding China and North Vietnam in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and Thailand.(11)

Likewise, the invasion of Iraq was driven by a desire for military bases in that country to ensure US political-military dominance of the entire Middle East/Persian Gulf region by allowing coercion of Iran and Syria. Thus, when the United States invaded Iraq, the Pentagon was already planning to maintain four "enduring bases" - meaning, permanent bases - in Iraq.(12) After Iraq insisted in 2008 on complete US withdrawal, the attention of the US military shifted to obtaining permanent bases in Afghanistan.

These permanent facilities are justified in variety of ways: the need to intimidate Iran, the continued war against al-Qaeda, the instability in Pakistan and the general advantage assumed to accompany US military power abroad. But any use of military force in the vast area where the network of bases is located would simply make Americans less secure. The real motive for projecting US military forces abroad is to enhance the power of the military institutions themselves and their Pentagon and other civilian allies, not to protect Americans from any serious threat to their security.

The security of the American people demands that all such bases intended to support wars that are not in the interests of the American people be closed down as part of the transformation of US national security policy from a posture that is provocative to Islamic peoples to one that is non-provocative.

The principle of avoiding military presence that provokes antagonistic responses applies to the complex of US military bases and alliances left over from the cold war in East Asia. The national security state argues that these bases are necessary to "shape" the security environment in East Asia. But that network of bases in the Asia-Pacific region still fulfills the same function that it did during the cold war. It is a vested interest in search of a rationale. Even after North and South Korea began negotiations on a settlement in the late 1990s, the Pentagon continued to have more military bases in East Asia.

The new rationale for expanding the US military footprint in Asia over the past decade has been to maintain a "hedge" against Chinese regional domination decades in the future. Such "hedging" in regard to possible war with China is central to the national security state's demand for extraordinary levels of military spending, without which it could justify wartime expenditures for the Air Force and Navy. That rationale is bogus; the consensus among intelligence and military analysts has long been that the importance of China's economic ties to the United States makes it unlikely that China will seek a confrontation with Washington.(13) A citizens' campaign should, therefore, call for a plan to phase out US bases in East Asia over the next decade.

Even if they don't suck the United States into a war, US military bases abroad are merely empty symbols of illusory power, which are regarded as perquisites of the US military's power at home and abroad. The only way to break the cycle of the quest for dominant power provoking conflict and insecurity is to demand that the United States adopt a policy like other major powers, including China, of abjuring foreign military presence.

Once the two main national security state dodges of wars against terrorism and power projection abroad are removed, the rationale for most US military spending disappears. There is no need for a large army, or for anything like the level of air and naval power sought for decades by those military services. The fundamental reform of national security policy should be accompanied by a cut in military spending to a fraction of the level during and after the cold war. This fundamental shift in policy from seeking dominant power to defending the homeland will, thus, require a comprehensive national plan for phasing out the present level of military spending and planning for peacetime economic alternatives in regard to production and employment.

A Legislative Charter for a New National Security Policy

In order to provide a focal point and action objective for a citizens' campaign for a new national security policy, we need a new legislative charter that outlines what must be done to bring about a decisive transition over the next few years from the existing policy to one that truly serves the interests of the American people.

That legislation should state, in part, that it "shall be the national policy of the United States":

to withdraw all military personnel from Islamic countries through a published timetable and to refrain from stationing troops or carrying out military operations in Islamic countries in the future;

to cease to pursue the aim of military dominance in the Middle East, the Persian Gulf and East Asia and to withdraw from military bases in those regions built on premises that are now clearly invalid;

to reduce military spending by 40 to 50 percent over the next three years and to continue to reduce spending further in the subsequent five-year period to a level representing no more than 30 percent of the level of military expenditures in fiscal year 2011;

to establish a national economic conversion plan to support this reduction in military expenditures.

Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and historian writing on US national security policy. His latest book, Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, was published in February of 2014. Follow him on Twitter: @GarethPorter.